(04-05-2021 01:52 PM)SoCalBobcat78 Wrote:  Australia's success with stamping out Covid-19 did not come from geography, it comes from a hard lockdown and a hard crackdown on violators of Covid-19 restrictions. The police were given more power and they used it. I have a relative that lives in Melbourne and she kept us informed as to how it was going over there. Because they have it under control, they can do contact tracing and keep the spread to a minimum. What they did in Australia would not work here.

Eh, it probably came from both. It's a lot easier to control influxes of people when you can only be reached by boat or plane.

As I said, hard lockdowns can stop a virus. As I also said, if we all jumped off a tall bridge that would too. The issue is the costs of the cure, the crackdowns, vs the benefits of stopping the virus. In a situation where public health experts call the shots, we don't get that kind of tradeoff analysis, because public health experts are experts only in public health - knowing what to do stop a virus - and the culture of public health is to stop diseases by "any means necessary" regardless of the costs incurred in doing so.

That's what was so wrong about the media pontifications about "heeding the warning of public health scientists" to the exclusion of all other voices. Public health experts can tell us what steps are likely to stop or reduce the spread of a disease. They don't have the expertise to tell us if the stopping/reduction of the spread of the disease is worth the costs of the steps taken to do so.